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Vista Sales Rate Fell Last Quarter
Microsoft is not directly mentioning Vista demand while they brag about how much money they made last quarter, because sales fell. "[Microsoft] shipped approximately 28 million copies of Vista in the latest quarter ended September, or 9.3 million copies per month. Though the Windows developer pointed to 27 percent growth in business licenses and noted that many home users were buying the more lucrative Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions, the rate represents a decline from the 10 million per month reported early in summer."
What about sales of Windows XP?
Who Cares? We all know what vista is and what it is not. Just purchase or use what meets your needs. Why is this article even posted?
Ubuntu sales remained flat...
I'm running Ultimate on a few computers and can't for the life of me think what features are worth paying the extra for.
Bitlocker - would love to use it but my laptop has a RAID-0 set of drives so bitlocker just hangs.
Dreamscene - movie instead of wallpaper. Shame I have to open windows that then obscure it *cough*
Texas Holdem - rarely play it
Language packs - yeah - dead useful
err... that's it.
Looking towards the ultimate site - nothing happening of note: http://windowsultimate.com/Default.aspx
Yawn.
> many home users were buying the more lucrative Vista Home Premium or
> Ultimate editions...
Obviously. The "Basic" version (which is still considerably more expensive than Mac OS X Leopard or certainly Linux) is crippled to the point of ridiculous. It doesn't even come with the ability to play DVD's; instead it will take you to a Microsoft page where you can buy the necessary plug-ins.
This is the way it should be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RsOIdF_DdY
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Vista is no longer "new", so obviously there is less demand. Those who want it already own it, those who don't aren't going to buy it, but it's still being shipped on millions of new PC's. This goes for pretty much any product, sales are strong at the beginning then gradually fade. I would expect Vista sales to continue dropping, with another spike after SP1 is released and more people feel like trying it out.
Apart from not being new, this also says nothing about the relative merits of Vista as an OS. In fact, if Vista sales had continued to increase right when people are saving up for the holidays, that would be extremely impressive, and quite unexpected.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Why is it not surprising that this is how the quarterly earnings report makes it onto Slashdot? The title could have read "Microsoft Reports 27% Revenue Growth; Fastest First Quarter Since 1999", or that Microsoft stock has reached its highest point it over 5 years. It might be notable that the Entertainment division was this quarter profitable, or that income in the client division still grew 25% (claims of slowing Vista sales notwithstanding).
As much as folks here love to think that MSFT is a sinking ship, it's having its healthiest growth in years.
I would be willing to bet that over the counter sales of Vista, that is, upgrades and personal new system builders, exceeded that for those of any Linux by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps true, but as someone who writes software for Windows for a living, I managed for about 2 days with Vista before I was overcome by the overwhelming urge to replace it with XP. It is, by far, the suckiest POS OS I've ever uses and I will do everything I can to avoid ever having to use it. Most people I know have had a similar Vista experience. I don't know a single person who has said, "Wow, Vista has really made my computer so much better." On the other hand, a lot of people who upgrade from Windows 98 to XP did say that about XP.
With all the nonsense that Microsoft pulls with its OEMs, one would also have to wonder what qualifies as a "sale". And, just because someone buys a box with Vista installed, doesn't mean that Vista stays installed. How many eventually choose to upgrade back to Windows XP?
Now, some of that breakage is the result of improved security, but our Windows driver guy tells me that the disruption caused by the security causes a lot of users to just disable the security.
Also, I understand that MS provided a version to a few top-tier OEMs that didn't require product activation by end users, so as not to annoy them. This resulted in a crack being written by the w4r3z community that doesn't require activation at all! (look for it on a p2p network near you.) The product activation is very sensitive to hardware changes, more so than XP, so that legitimate users get no end of hassle from Vista, while pirates aren't inconvenienced at all.
Surely Microsoft must have had some regular people beta test Vista. And surely some - maybe all - of these people must have told MS that Vista shouldn't ship in the state it's in.
My wife is thinking about getting a new laptop. I said to her "Make sure you don't get Vista, it's really screwed up" and you know what she said? "Oh, yeah I know. Apple runs these TV ads with a young guy who's supposed to be a Mac, and a guy who looks like Bill Gates who's supposed to be a PC. And whenever they try to talk to each other, this Secret Service agent interrupts them to make sure it's OK."
Remember the Twiggy drive? Apple tried to manufacture their own floppy disk drive for the Apple II. They were never able to get it to work. There was a big shareholder lawsuit. I could really see a shareholder lawsuit coming from Vista. Corporate officers have a fiduciary duty - that means they're legally obligated - to look after shareholder interests. And Billy and Steve Balmer really screwed up.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Considering how hard to impossible it is to get XP on your favorite hardware, XP is going like gangbusters.
Vista is the new Coke few want. Ch^H^HRant with me now...
We want our old Coke back!
We want our old Coke back!
I come here for the love
Sales of Linux is a meaningless number. If you look at total installs, it's much better. I expect it's still less than Vista, and will continue to be until it works properly out the box (which hopefully won't be long, it's getting much better, but it still requires quite complicated configuration with certain, not that uncommon, hardware).
As for an economic downturn... something tells me the free OS will do better than the expensive one when everyone suddenly runs out of money...
Something really does feel different from previous Windows OS introductions.
My nontechnical friends and acquaintance do make light conversation about things they've heard of in the news, and will ask me, as a "computer genius," what I'm using at work. Previous Windows upgrades got mentioned in casual talk. Usually there are a least a few people who want to be the first kid on the block with it.
Not this time.
People talk about the iPhone, they talk about their newly-installed Verizon FiOS, their iPods, what brands of Wintel computers I trust, whether they can run Windows on the Intel Macs.
I don't detect any consumer excitement about Vista. Nobody has asked me if they should upgrade. And a couple of people have asked me whether I agree with friends of their who told them to avoid it.
Unscientific sample? You bet.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
No. There's a brief surge of 'back-to-school' sales in August, and then a small decline, with Christmas sales starting to pick up around Halloween. It's followed that pattern for a very long time.
My blog
That stock was apparently sold off before 2002. The shame of it is, that $150 million investment would be worth about $6.5 billion today!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Microsoft in any way and prefer Linux as an OS. My below post is being unbiased and discussing Vista purely as a mainstream, consumer OS.
Ahem.
Except it's not crappy. It's a perfectly fine Windows OS. It's better than XP in every way I can think of.
The problem, I think, is that it doesn't really have anything to get people who are content with XP to upgrade. That combined with all the FUD about Vista makes for poor sales. I got it because I built a new machine, mainly for gaming. My old machine still had Win2000 on it as I wasn't a fan of XP. Now it has Slackware.
What happens to linux during an economic downturn, what you mean like the one we had when the bubble burst? People all of sudden realized that no, you do NOT require expensive systems to run servers, you can do it with a whiteboxes running linux. You pick up sun gear for a song as all the dotcoms who had splurged on unneeded equipment went bust, while the likes of google (linux) continued on, because they kept their costs under control.
Your troll sounds reasonable, until you remember linux has been around long enough to have seen what you predict, and came out stronger then ever.
As for MS making lots more money, that is true enough (it is also spending a lot more) but if what you say then MS shouldn't feel at all threatned, so why is it acting like it is? You are sayinga mighty lion is not going to be scared by a little dog, while behind you that lion is trying to climb a tree to get away from it.
Most opensource developers already got good jobs, they do this on the side, because they want too. You are predicting that people will stop their hobby when the economy goes bad? A hobby that doesn't really cost anything except time? You got a weird view of human nature.
I got a next troll for you, linux will die when the developers discover girls.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"One wonders, too, just how well Linux would survive an economic downturn." Yes. How could an essentially free OS possibly survive when people have less money? I imagine the idiotic price structure for Vista would become a little more apparent in such a case.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
I assume those numbers also include the copy I received (and promptly wiped) when I bought my new Thinkpad.
Yes, you know it does. You also know it includes those that got wiped for XP or Linux. What would be a good indicator is how many have shipped versus how many "called home" last week for updates. The actual numbers of running Vista instances is greatly exaggerated.
My guess is Microsoft will keep that number very very quiet. If Vista was a car, it would be known as an Edsel.
The business market has a little more choice available (XP is still being sold to businesses), and Windows XP is still the big seller.
So what does this tell us? When there is a choice, XP is purchased instead of Vista. Microsoft tis so desperate to make it appear as if Vista is selling, that they are counting the Vista->XP "downgrade" as a Vista license in use.
We run XP Pro Corporate edition at work, which allows distribution via disk imaging. When we needed 50 new XP licenses, our distributor told us XP Pro Corp. is no longer available, but we could buy Vista licenses, and "downgrade" to XP. We have absolutely no intention of running Vista.
I bet a large proportion of the increases in business licenses are companies like ours who need just need more XP licenses.
The Vista Media Center experience is a *lot* better, but it's still the only part of Vista which got better. :)
For those of us with MCE's as our Tivo, and some specific problems with MCE2005, it's a good upgrade.
All this political in-fighting between the XP and Vista communities just proves that Windows is not ready for desktop.
It will have XP as an option or just come with XP
I just bought a Dell. They sell the same laptops as "small business" machines that they sell for the consumer market, for about $200 less if you count the service contract - in basic black instead of shiny mac colors, and XP is one of the features they're pushing. They know businesses don't want Vista that will break their programs with those new security features.
You know, if you write an OS that refuses to run any programs at all, then you're perfectly secure.
Compatibility, for example. Or maybe most people just don't like the interface? How about the fact that it wants me to reactivate my product every few weeks?
Regardless of how high-end my computer is, I do not want Windows Vista. XP handles my printing. For everything else, there's Ubuntu.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Vista helped Microsoft, yet again, beat wall-street expectations (the people that are paid to know about these things) - http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/10/26/microsoft-q1-profits ...and it's sold 88 million copies so far. Not bad for an operating system that "doesn't work".
throw new NoSignatureException();
It's a perfectly fine Windows OS. It's better than XP in every way I can think of.
If that's not damning with faint praise, I don't know what is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So basically, sales volume dropped 7%. They *only* sold 9.3 million copies, instead of the 10 million they sold in summer. While this article is an attempt to go "ha ha" to Microsoft, I think that's pretty darned good.
Also consider that a rather large shopping season is right around the corner. Consumers will be rushing to upgrade their computers for the family, and businesses will be looking to spend some cash to get bigger tax breaks.
Microsoft also cooled it on the advertising for the last quarter. They have a new campaign which is just now starting, and I predict the money they *didn't* spend last quarter will be given to the Q4 advertising budget.
-David
If Vista sales were really as bad as Slashdot and its readers would like you to believe, then Microsoft would have been hammered by Wall Street.
Think about it. A massive percentage of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows. (With most of the rest coming from Office.) If Vista sales were bad, or even a just a little under what was expected, Microsoft's stock would take a hit.
But, funny enough, that's exactly the opposite of what happened last week. Microsoft's stock is up about 10%. And that's a HUGE deal for a company as mature and with such a huge market cap as Microsoft.
Now, granted, Vista sales aren't the only thing that can affect Microsoft's stock price. There was lots of good news for Microsoft. Windows Server market share is increasing (at what just so happens to be almost exactly the pace at which Linux server market share has decreased in recent months), their "entertainment" group (aka Xbox) posted their 2nd profit (thanks to Halo 3), and Office sales are awesome.
But the fact remains that Vista sales are meeting or beating expectations. Virtually all Vista sales happen via new PC purchases, and those were higher than expected for most of the year... thanks to, you guess it, Vista.
Since we're just pre-holiday season right now, PC sales tend to drop a bit... and that's what happened. (And please note that the sales RATE dropped, yet overall sales are still higher than last year at this time.) To say that this drop was caused by Vista is, put simply, retarded.
I wonder if a practice like this should catch the attention of FCC? After all, shareholders are being mislead by reporting of the sales figures of specific products. Especially, if the sales report is basically falsifying the sales of a new product, which is always crucial for market valuation purposes.
You know... Apple sold 2.1 mil. in the entire quarter. MS sold 9.3 mil. LAST MONTH. They've sold 28 mil. copies of Vista in the last quarter.
That comes up to about 7.5%. About just where it should stand with that 5% of computer market share.
Oh... and MS sold 88 mil. copies of Vista so far. That is 88 mil copies of a piece of shit OS.
And even without silly commercials where one annoying guy is Vista and other irritating guy is something else.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/
:)
Eek, modded down so many times! And you almost have a 5 digit user id, so you must have been doing this for a very long time! Well, you're certainly persistent! Have you considered a career in Jehovah's Witnesses? They keep coming to my house and I can't seem to get them to give up. I think you and they may have a lot in common, with the obvious exception that you're slightly more fanatic about your beliefs.
This is exactly the same where I work, and has been ever since Vista went gold. I work for a fortune 10, so there's potentially thousands of Vista licenses sold just to us that are being used for XP.
If as I suspect this is a Microsoft thing rather than our anything to do with our respective software distributors, then yes, there is probably a significant portion of Vista corporate licenses sold being used solely for Windows XP. I know our IT department have absolutely no plans to move anyone to Vista, they are avoiding it like the plague for the forseeable future.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Then you have never installed Vista.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I'll go for the whale cock one. Except we are talking nano tubes and across multiple trans-dimensional universes
I just bought myself a thinkpad x61s. Lovely little machine. It came with 1Gb of RAM and Vista Business edition. I also bought a ram upgrade to 2 Gb. Unfortunately it has not arrived yet so I am stuck with the wonder of vista at 1 Gb.
First booting the thing. It takes around 10 mins before it is in a usable state, or so my watch tells me. I believe it is much more but vista projects a small pocket in which time no longer has meaning, because I could swear I saw a couple of glaciers speed by.
Then when it finally starts it has already used 90% of the ram and has happily begun swapping to the hard drive. Which means I have 30 minutes before the battery dies.
And then I have three icons in the system tray telling me which wireless networks i am connected with. Thank you very much I really need the same information thrice and I wonder whether you would be kind enough to take up another 50 Mb of ram to tell me again. (I concede that this might be lenovo's/intel's fault)
Then we have a full microsoft office install including a SQL server running. Just not authorized. Because the authorization code that my workplace has for office 2007 apparently is not valid for the pre-installed version of office. Now I have to deinstall everything, and install it again from the CD's at work. Then you have to brave the whole "are you sure you want to remove office"/"allow/cancel"/"special privileges continue"/"take a hit of the whale cock" before it is actually gone. after the machine is rebooted you are greeted with a slew of silly balloon messages and windows telling you that windows has changed the boot-up and "some services have not been started" and "do you want to start them?". No I f'ing want you to shut up and do what you are told, without the town crier declaring it with a trumpet fanfare before and after.
Now I just live in constant fear of pressing or clicking something that will start memory system thrashing.
It has been an interesting learning experience though and I'll see how much the extra ram helps. But for as long as possible I am sticking with XP and Ubuntu on my other machines.
- rant done
This is pure spin. Look at how this article takes Microsoft's huge jump in profits and manages to turn it into somehow Microsoft is failing and covering up their failure. Of course sales of Vista fell compared to the first few months it was being sold! Everyone who was going to be an early adopter of Vista bought it within that time frame. Now sales are going to be more linked to the OEM channel, and independant sales are going to slow as cautious users wait for SP1.
Seriously, articles like this are pure FUD, trying to take a moment of Microsoft's success and some how make it about their failure. If the OSS community wants to support article writers like the jackass who wrote this one, you're just going to hoodwink yourselves into thinking you're destroying Microsoft when in fact, they're posting record profits and sales of Vista are moving along quite nicely.
Here's a little dose of reality:
Source
And while the Cupertino-based company crossed its fingers and hoped that the trade-off was the right strategy, statistics released by Market Share by Net Applications paint an entirely different picture. Market Share by Net Applications data reveals that MacIntel has lost market share and is down to 2.48% in June compared with 2.51% in May. Mac OS has also dropped to 3.52% from 3.95% two months ago.
The open source Linux operating system is stagnating. The various distributions of Linux are credited with only 0.71% of the operating system market in June 2007, up from 0.70% in May. One other platform that has been continuously experiencing the erosion of its market share is Windows XP. With Windows Vista available for five months already, XP users are increasingly upgrading their operating systems. Vista has a good momentum in the detriment of XP, which dropped from 82.02% in May to 81.94% in June. By comparison, Vista continues to increase its installed base and has jumped from 3.74% in May to 4.52% of the operating system market in June.
The reality of the situation is, Vista surpassed Mac OS X and Linux in desktop usage without breaking a sweat. The reality of the situation is, XP users are upgrading to Vista. The reality of the situation is, IE6 users are upgrading to IE7, either through Vista upgrades or Windows Update. If you don't like any of these realities, and you want to do something to advance the cause, please do. But don't let idiotic propaganda articles trick you into thinking the battle is already being won, because it isn't.
The only credit I can give to the author of this sad excuse for journalism is that I simply couldn't imagine it was possible to spin a leap in revenue and profit, in the billions of dollars, for a single quarter, into somehow saying Microsoft is suffering. Making a big fuss about "slowing" sales of Vista, when any operating system sold, including OSX has the exact same sales characteristic. After the initial rush of sales during the first few months of product release, sales of OSX slowed! OH NOES! And pointing out that Microsoft's advertising unit posted a loss due to an acquisition... duh.
This article is crap, and it's sad that it got posted on slashdot because it only feeds the flow of misinformation to the OSS community. I remember how upset we all used to get about Microsoft FUD articles, yet it seems some of those pretending to support OSS have figured out that they can write pro-OSS or anti-Microsoft FUD articles and most people will lap it up because that's what they want to hear.
Funny, Gartner put Mac Market Share at 8.1% for Q3 2007 for sales. 6.3% overall marketshare if you believe IDC. http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/10/18/reports-apples-us-market-share-now-81-or-is-it-63/
While I agree with the idea the article is extrapolating one data point, the rest of the rant is nonsense.
Here's a little dose of reality:
Your source is Bill Gates at WINHEC. You are the pot calling the kettle black. You are as guilty of spinning as the summary's author.
While you personally may believe what you wrote, it's impossible to know what the motivation is. Microsoft rewards you for evangelizing their stuff? Or perhaps you enjoy living in a Microsoft jail. Or maybe you haven't been burned yet.
Please reconsider because it's time for a reality check.
If there was some actual change in the market share of Windows OS licensees who spend every month fighting for Microsoft's table scraps versus Apple (who remains in the top 3 brands) versus Linux you would see resellers changing their offerings in the marketplace. And that is exactly what's happening. Dell is shipping Ubuntu. Other resellers are sure to follow.
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